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Skarner, I miss your kind

This is a really great quote from Morello that is very important to Skarner's identity. The new kit still accomplishes those goals just in a different way. Skarner is able to more effectively get on to targets with the new E, and with the improved W he has an easier time keeping up with his targets. The target has a little more freedom of movement than before but Skarner is still able to maintain his effective range.

That's good to know... I'd hate to see him change that way.

Scruffy, while you're here, do you have a time frame for when we might have a chance to test him on the PBE?

But you've created an a conditional gap-closing mechanic by making his slow a skillshot :\.

Skarner on live is in a worse place for closing the gap. His Shield is weaker and easier to break and he's slower. Live Skarner can stick to a target better due to perma-slow but PBE Skarner will be able to Gap-close faster due to the ranged slow and then reapply that slow at close range to stick to targets.

He should be better in all stages of the game even if he loses some of that Permaslow in exchange for being more likely to get to his target in the first place.

The ranged slow is great and may even grant Skarner more Flash-popping which is something we all want to see.

Skarner on live is in a worse place for closing the gap. His Shield is weaker and easier to break and he's slower. Live Skarner can stick to a target better due to perma-slow but PBE Skarner will be able to Gap-close faster due to the ranged slow and then reapply that slow at close range to stick to targets.

He should be better in all stages of the game even if he loses some of that Permaslow in exchange for being more likely to get to his target in the first place.

The ranged slow is great and may even grant Skarner more Flash-popping which is something we all want to see.

Did you read that Morello quotation?

A gap closer and easy flash-popping is NOT what he should have!

And again, making a champion stronger is not making a champion more fun to play! Skarner can be strong with his current champion design--we've seen it in S2 and the beginning of S3 before his nerfs to mana costs and cooldowns. I'm all for tweaking some of the power in his kit--but his core gameplay pattern is being completely overhauled here. I liked Scruffy's first iteration better, where his Q only applied the slow every other cast. At least that maintains the essence of his kit, even if it does remove some of the permaslow power.

Skarner on live is in a worse place for closing the gap. His Shield is weaker and easier to break and he's slower. Live Skarner can stick to a target better due to perma-slow but PBE Skarner will be able to Gap-close faster due to the ranged slow and then reapply that slow at close range to stick to targets.

He should be better in all stages of the game even if he loses some of that Permaslow in exchange for being more likely to get to his target in the first place.

The ranged slow is great and may even grant Skarner more Flash-popping which is something we all want to see.

The problem is that it has a cast time.
This has been proven TIME AND TIME AGAIN, that having something you are using to CATCH UP TO SOMEONE have a CAST TIME, it makes it COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.

This is a really great quote from Morello that is very important to Skarner's identity. The new kit still accomplishes those goals just in a different way. Skarner is able to more effectively get on to targets with the new E, and with the improved W he has an easier time keeping up with his targets. The target has a little more freedom of movement than before but Skarner is still able to maintain his effective range.

Scruffy, I'm sorry, but giving Skarner "generic moderate cooldown moderately effective snare." does not even remotely keep with what Morello was saying.

It turns him into "Hey. I'm that guy who's only dangerous because I can potentially drag you into my team. Feel free to just walk away from me with extreme ease though, even if I do somehow close the gap."

This is a really great quote from Morello that is very important to Skarner's identity. The new kit still accomplishes those goals just in a different way. Skarner is able to more effectively get on to targets with the new E, and with the improved W he has an easier time keeping up with his targets. The target has a little more freedom of movement than before but Skarner is still able to maintain his effective range.

could just make the movespeed on his W stay weither or not his shield is broken or not so he can catch u even if u hit him 1 time ot knock his W off cuz i know i would W to catch people and they would just hit me since i dnt max W until lvl 18 cuz i perfer more dmg so i run Tforce and swifties to keep up with people like udyr does

But you've created an a conditional gap-closing mechanic by making his slow a skillshot :\.

Gap closing mechanics aren't limited to propelling your own champion--Glitterlance is a gapcloser too. And, except for the pix part of Glitterlance, his new E is indistinguishable in design from that ability. I don't care if for some reason you were to decide to nerf Skarner--I care that he's not the same champion anymore, and that his champion design was NEVER a problem. His skills, outside of his ult, have become homogenized with others.

How is Q supposed to feel much different than Hecarim's rampage?

Before you couldn't find any skill that was even remotely similar to Crystal Slash. It was unique and awesome, and had appropriate counterplay within the champion's kit.

How is W supposed to feel much different than Hecarim's E?

What made Skarner's shield cool was that it was his "I'm going to stand up to you and fight" ability. I'm going to get a shield that gives me the ability to attack faster and get my shield back quicker if you don't displace me! That's gone.

How is E supposed to feel much different than Lulu's glitterlance?

Ranged skillshot slow. You're taking the power of his kit and moving it onto such a generic ability design. Also, even though this probably makes him stronger and able to get targets more easily, why is this a good thing???? The greatest piece of counterplay to Skarner has always been about keeping him at range.

The community OVERWHELMINGLY responded that both the most FUN and the most FRUSTRATING things about playing AS/AGAINST him were both ULTING and GETTING ulted. I sincerely believe that you've made getting ults off easier, which may be strong, but it removes the SATISFACTION of overcoming difficulties to grab a high priority target, and INCREASES FRUSTRATION of an enemy because now Skarner can throw out a low CD skillshot, miss, and then just throw one out in another ~8 seconds. Before you had to burn W, Shurelia's, maybe flash or ghost to get past tight defenses. When it works, it feels great. With the new kit, what's so special about hitting a skillshot that comes up every 10 seconds? Where's the reward in that?

EDIT: ADDITIONALLY you were one of the ONLY respondents to your own questions that identified the Permaslow as being the frustrating part of his kit to play against. I feel as though you've tunnelvisioned into your own beliefs here, as EVERY iteration of his kit that you've presented has found some way to get rid of this mechanic. Read my last paragraph. Your current iteration is going to exacerbate frustrations of playing against.

Also, you keep saying "it feels stronger in playtests". We. Do. Not. Doubt. This. We doubt that he feels more fun to select for a game. A champion with 4 point and click 1.0 AP ratio nukes is going to be an insanely strong mage--but a really boring one. Strength is not indicative of a good design. Just look at AP Yi.

I want to respond to a few things in this post that I really disagree with.

"What made Skarner's shield cool was that it was his "I'm going to stand up to you and fight" ability. I'm going to get a shield that gives me the ability to attack faster and get my shield back quicker if you don't displace me!"

Except, this wasn't all that Skarner's shield was. It was his only gapclosing mechanism, meaning that it couldn't be used for the stand and fight purpose as often as you would ideally like. Also, I hated that the attack speed was attached to the shield. It felt absolutely terrible unless you were really fed. Enemy you're dueling has damage: they pop your shield instantly and you have no attack speed. You're in a teamfight: shield gets popped instantly and you have no attack speed. It was a snowball mechanism that tended to snowball against Skarner. It felt terrible to use. I'm apathetic to the rest of the changes to Skarner's kit, but the one thing I support above all else is moving the attack speed off of the goddamn shield. Making it so that he's not absolutely useless when behind is great for Skarner.

"I sincerely believe that you've made getting ults off easier, which may be strong, but it removes the SATISFACTION of overcoming difficulties to grab a high priority target, and INCREASES FRUSTRATION of an enemy because now Skarner can throw out a low CD skillshot, miss, and then just throw one out in another ~8 seconds. Before you had to burn W, Shurelia's, maybe flash or ghost to get past tight defenses. "

This is unrealistic. To begin with, this change does not decrease the satisfaction of landing ultimates. So long as the ultimate retains roughly the same power, it will feel satisfying to use. What it will do is decrease the frustration of Skarner players because they won't see their own ultimates fail anymore. Frustration was a higher factor than satisfaction for Skarner players because surmounting obstacles to reach priority targets relied not on their own play, but on the mistakes of enemies.

Additionally, this is unlikely to increase the frustration of his enemies in the way you describe. I mean, look at what you've said. If Skarner is in a position to be throwing out E's at his enemies constantly in the hopes of catching someone, that means he's in a standoff situation with his team. In that kind of situation, if your targets are in range that you would have a chance to throw random E's onto them to initiate a fight, you're in range to just shield in and start the fight anyway. Your situation of it being frustrating to enemies because Skarner can keep spamming the skillshot trying to initiate is unrealistic, because Skarner is already capable of initiating onto targets within that range. Having enemy carries standing in range of that skillshot is easy to counterplay: they just won't stand there.

It should be mentioned that a significant number of people did respond that being permaslowed with no means of escape was frustrating. That doesn't mean it should be changed, but saying that it wasn't something people identified as being frustrating isn't accurate.

You don't have to like all of the changes. I don't either, and I have concerns. Even though I like a couple of the changes (attack speed off shield is only good as far as I'm concerned), I'm not entirely sure the overall kit is going where I'd like to see it go. However, some of your arguments just don't make sense. They sound more like attempts to portray everything as bad, instead of attempts to analyze what actually is bad. It doesn't help your case if you use weak arguments.

Also, as a final note, a crowd control is not a gapcloser. A gapcloser is anything that modifies your own movement to get you closer to or farther from enemies, particularly blinks or dashes. Long range crowd controls can help you close in on enemies, but they aren't gapclosers. Just a matter of definition, things like Lulu's glitterlance are not gapclosers, even though they help you get closer to enemies. That doesn't mean that those sorts of things belong on Skarner's kit. I'm not arguing for that. I'm just saying that your definition of anything that helps you get closer to an enemy champions is not what the term gapcloser is used for.

I want to respond to a few things in this post that I really disagree with.

"What made Skarner's shield cool was that it was his "I'm going to stand up to you and fight" ability. I'm going to get a shield that gives me the ability to attack faster and get my shield back quicker if you don't displace me!"

Except, this wasn't all that Skarner's shield was. It was his only gapclosing mechanism, meaning that it couldn't be used for the stand and fight purpose as often as you would ideally like. Also, I hated that the attack speed was attached to the shield. It felt absolutely terrible unless you were really fed. Enemy you're dueling has damage: they pop your shield instantly and you have no attack speed. You're in a teamfight: shield gets popped instantly and you have no attack speed. It was a snowball mechanism that tended to snowball against Skarner. It felt terrible to use. I'm apathetic to the rest of the changes to Skarner's kit, but the one thing I support above all else is moving the attack speed off of the goddamn shield. Making it so that he's not absolutely useless when behind is great for Skarner.

"I sincerely believe that you've made getting ults off easier, which may be strong, but it removes the SATISFACTION of overcoming difficulties to grab a high priority target, and INCREASES FRUSTRATION of an enemy because now Skarner can throw out a low CD skillshot, miss, and then just throw one out in another ~8 seconds. Before you had to burn W, Shurelia's, maybe flash or ghost to get past tight defenses. "

This is unrealistic. To begin with, this change does not decrease the satisfaction of landing ultimates. So long as the ultimate retains roughly the same power, it will feel satisfying to use. What it will do is decrease the frustration of Skarner players because they won't see their own ultimates fail anymore. Frustration was a higher factor than satisfaction for Skarner players because surmounting obstacles to reach priority targets relied not on their own play, but on the mistakes of enemies.

Additionally, this is unlikely to increase the frustration of his enemies in the way you describe. I mean, look at what you've said. If Skarner is in a position to be throwing out E's at his enemies constantly in the hopes of catching someone, that means he's in a standoff situation with his team. In that kind of situation, if your targets are in range that you would have a chance to throw random E's onto them to initiate a fight, you're in range to just shield in and start the fight anyway. Your situation of it being frustrating to enemies because Skarner can keep spamming the skillshot trying to initiate is unrealistic, because Skarner is already capable of initiating onto targets within that range. Having enemy carries standing in range of that skillshot is easy to counterplay: they just won't stand there.

It should be mentioned that a significant number of people did respond that being permaslowed with no means of escape was frustrating. That doesn't mean it should be changed, but saying that it wasn't something people identified as being frustrating isn't accurate.

You don't have to like all of the changes. I don't either, and I have concerns. Even though I like a couple of the changes (attack speed off shield is only good as far as I'm concerned), I'm not entirely sure the overall kit is going where I'd like to see it go. However, some of your arguments just don't make sense. They sound more like attempts to portray everything as bad, instead of attempts to analyze what actually is bad. It doesn't help your case if you use weak arguments.

Also, as a final note, a crowd control is not a gapcloser. A gapcloser is anything that modifies your own movement to get you closer to or farther from enemies, particularly blinks or dashes. Long range crowd controls can help you close in on enemies, but they aren't gapclosers. Just a matter of definition, things like Lulu's glitterlance are not gapclosers. That doesn't mean that those sorts of things belong on Skarner's kit. I'm not arguing for that. I'm just saying that your definition of anything that helps you get closer to an enemy champions is not what the term gapcloser is used for.

First, I'll qualify my post by saying that I wrote much of that in haste in order to get the thoughts out, and they weren't fully fleshed out. If you read through the thread, you'll also find that I expound on each individual issue in more detail, and I've just sort of assumed that people have been following along with it. It's my fault for having lack of clarity.

First, I accept that I was wrong in calling the ranged slow a gap closer. Technically, you're right in that it isn't. My fleshed out point is that it works like a gap closer. Skarner's always been able to amplify his own movespeed (which I think you would define as a gapcloser). My reasoning comes from this logic: movespeed enhancing gap closers close gaps between champions by creating a disparity in movespeeds (i.e. if I'm using an ability to move 100 units faster than you, like Hecarim, then I'm closing a gap at X rate). A 50% slow on an enemy champion (let's assume 375 movespeed) will create a much stronger gap closing ability for Skarner when he activates his shield and runs at the slowed champion, given the larger disparity in movespeed.

Second, just to quickly address one thing--I've been taking on a pet project at my home computer gathering data on how many respondents in the community identified as the most frustrating part of playing against him as A) Getting ulted B) Getting permaslowed C) Him sustaining or D) Something else. I'm only to page ~40 by now and I want to get to page 65 before I make my thread, but I can tell you that the numbers are overwhelming. This was my attempt to isolate my personal biases and identify an objective collective community response.

Third, I agree that moving the attack speed elsewhere was a good design choice. That said, it helped make the ability unique. It's not that I want it to be the same--it's that I want it to be unique, even if it is different. For example, moving the heal from the E onto the shield and the attack speed onto the E would be a fine design choice IMO, because it would make those abilities still feel unique, but be different in a healthy way.

Fourth, I don't know how much you play Skarner, but if you play him as much as I do, you'd know that it's not simple to engage on a priority target from standoff range. As a poster a couple posts above yours said, he expects it to be a flash popper. It will be, if it goes live. There are more built in mechanics for teams to stop Skarner from running up to a group to ult than there are for cleansing a slow that will allow Skarner's teammates to initiate if the team abandons the afflicted targets. I don't really know how else you can put it--being able to slow an enemy at range before activating your movespeed boost significantly improves your ability to reach that target. There really isn't any debate about that, and Scruffy has stated that this intent is to make starting fights easier. This isn't just me who knows what the reworked E will mean for getting ults off.

Fifth, I think Skarner players' biggest gripe about their own ults is the unreliability for the ability to actually go off, which Scruffy has addressed, and is a good change. Other than that, my point was to highlight that right now there's a very satisfying amount of counterplay on Skarner's ability to get an ult off--and that tipping the balance of this ease will upset (most likely the ones getting ulted) more players than it will please.

I understand that you might disagree on a few of these points, and that's fine. My overarching message to RiotScruffy is that he should attempt to iterate more on his kit and not get stuck on this one, as it lacks uniqueness and has received negative feedback from multiple angles (the AP skarners, the jungle skarners, the bruiser lane skarners) that I believe highlights that his current iteration of the kit can be greatly improved.

The attack speed numbers on Q were actually much higher in the earlier iterations of the new kit. He was totally OP in our playtests, and dominating in every phase of the game.

Skarner's damage doesn't come from his auto attacks primarily. The reason, as many of you experienced Skarner players know, that Skarner scales very well with attack speed is because of the -1s (0.5 on minions) that it applies to his spell cooldowns.

The exact numbers aren't final, but the 1% nerf on his base attack speed is a direction that we tried out and liked. We thought it was much cooler for Skarner to have slightly lower base attack speed and potentially scale up to higher numbers once he has been fighting for a few seconds.

In his pre rework design, he has tremendous attack speed IF he can keep his shield up. This can create some optimization confusion for a few reasons:

-Should I use my shield to block damage? This is ideal use of the shield mitigation, but it will break.
-Should I use my shield when I am not taking damage for the attack speed? This is great for the attack speed buff, but the shield has provided me sub optimal mitigation.

Moving the attack speed to Q has remedied this confusing element of his kit.

Additionally, a lot of the feedback on Skarner was that he has a very feast or famine gameplay. In one case, Skarner is ahead and he has a huge attack speed buff that is further increasing his lead. In the other, Skarner is losing and he can't even use his attack speed buff because the shield is broken very quickly.

With this problem in mind, the change does intentionally lower Skarner's attack speed in the best case scenario (shield is up for full duration). But the changes also bring an increase to the average attack speed and lower the standard deviation.

I'd like to continue to discuss the merits and problems with the proposed changes, and I have been seriously considering every argument made. Also, I don't have any exact dates for when he will be on the PBE yet, but I will let you know as soon as I find out.

Edit: The E still has it's old cast time, but it has extended range and a slow so if you hit, you can easily reach the target.

This is a really great quote from Morello that is very important to Skarner's identity. The new kit still accomplishes those goals just in a different way. Skarner is able to more effectively get on to targets with the new E, and with the improved W he has an easier time keeping up with his targets. The target has a little more freedom of movement than before but Skarner is still able to maintain his effective range.

I'm fine with whatever you do to him as long as you remove the permaslow. It's a bad design and it's unsatisfying for both the player (because it weakens the rest of his kit so much) and the victim.